I think it's a step forward in that it's more integrated into the platform. Remember when TCP/IP used to be an add-on for an operating system?
> managers at Adobe and Sun must be kicking themselves
Both tried. As I recall Sun were blocked by Microsoft, and Flash was bundled as standard with Netscape from about 2001 onwards. Steve Jobs killed that stone-dead when he point-blank refused to support it on iDevices.
Some companies have all the right ideas and for whatever reason still can't execute.
Adobe AIR beat things like Electron and PhoneGap to market by years. IMHO the issue with Adobe is this insistence on 'open' still having various vary opinionated elements. Adobe Air for example had a lot of good ideas but still attempted to evangelize Flash and ActionScript. I _think_ MS is trying to pivot of that grave now with .NET Core. Time will tell if the Mono-to-Wasm or .NET Core Native projects have legs.
I was so very excited about Adobe Air and wrote a production application with it in 2009.
I _think_ a sweet spot for WASM data processing. The data visualization space should explode once I can with data in the browser at near native speed.
To be fair, AIR was not the first in the domain. Mozilla had XUL/XULRunner ~15 years ago, which could be used to quickly develop kick-ass cross-platform applications in JS (and is still, by and large, the base of Thunderbird and Firefox).
Sun thought that they had something like that with Java Apps ~20 years ago, except they forgot to make installation and UX compelling, and the memory requirements were unacceptable for the time.
I remember trying to do stuff with Adobe AIR and it just felt like a collosal waste of time. As soon as you tried to do anything that interacted outside of their sandbox you were severely limited. I remember some guys did a hack called cairngorm that I looked at but it seemed quite cumbersome. Then there was support, I think it was only after a few years they just gave up and spun it off to Apache ... you need to stick at it longer than that to establish yourself ...
Macs have always been throttled frying pans. They sacrifice much performance for the sake of thinness and design.
No wonder Flash always performed badly on mac devices.
> managers at Adobe and Sun must be kicking themselves
Both tried. As I recall Sun were blocked by Microsoft, and Flash was bundled as standard with Netscape from about 2001 onwards. Steve Jobs killed that stone-dead when he point-blank refused to support it on iDevices.